A Canadian-Scot: ‘I was sent back with three bloody prisoners, you see, and one was limping and groaning, so I had to keep on kicking the sod down the trench. He was an officer. It was getting dark and I was getting fed up, so I thought: “I’ll have a bit of a game.” I had them covered with the officer’s revolver and I made ’em open their pockets. Then I dropped a Mills’ bomb in each, with the pin out, and ducked behind a traverse. Bang, bang, bang! No more bloody prisoners. No good Fritzes but dead ’uns.’ An Australian: ‘Well, the biggest lark I had was at Morlancourt when we took it the first time. There were a lot of Jerries in a cellar and I said to ’em: “Come out, you Camarades.” So out they came, a dozen of ’em, with their hands up. “Turn out your pockets,” I told ’em. They turned ’em out. Watches and gold and stuff, all dinkum. Then I said: “Now back into your cellar, you sons of bitches.” For I couldn’t be bothered with ’em. When they were all down I threw half a dozen Mills’ bombs in after ’em. I’d got the stuff all right, and we weren’t taking prisoners that day.’ The only first-hand account I heard of large-scale atrocities was from an old woman at Cardonette on the Somme, with whom I was billeted in July 1916. It was at Cardonette that a battalion of French Turcos overtook the rear guard of a German division retreating from the Marne in September 1914. The Turcos surprised the dead-weary Germans while they were still marching in column. The old woman went, with gestures, through a pantomime of slaughter, ending: ‘Et enfin, ces animaux leur ont arraché les oreilles et les ont mis à la poche.’ The presence of coloured troops in Europe was, from the German point of view, we knew, one of the chief Allied atrocities. We sympathized. Recently, at Flixécourt, one of the instructors told us, the cook of a corps headquarter-mess used to be visited at the château every morning by a Turco; he was orderly to a French liaison officer. The Turco used to say: ‘Tommy, give Johnny pozzy,’ and a tin of plum and apple jam used to be given him. One afternoon the corps was due to shift, so that morning the cook said to the Turco, giving him his farewell tin: ‘Oh, la, la, Johnny, napoo pozzy to-morrow.’ The Turco would not believe it. ‘Yes, Tommy, mate,’ he said, ‘pozzy for Johnny to-morrow, to-morrow, to-morrow.’ To get rid of him the cook said: ‘Fetch me the head of a Fritz, Johnny, to-night. I’ll ask the general to give you pozzy to-morrow, to-morrow, to-morrow.’ ‘All right, mate,’ said the Turco, ‘me get Fritz head to-night, general give me pozzy to-morrow.’ That evening the mess cook of the new corps that had taken over the château was surprised to find a Turco asking for him and swinging a bloody head in a sandbag. ‘Here’s Fritz head, mate,’ said the Turco, ‘general give me pozzy to-morrow, to-morrow, to-morrow.’ As Flixécourt was twenty miles or more behind the line.... He did not need to end the